Friday, February 29, 2008

Yesterday the tag team effort of Mike Florio and Chris Mottram started a tidal wave of responses to a potential Brett Favre retirement. A news station in Wisconsin immediately picked up the story at around 1:30pm yesterday and called the Packers PR Department. It was all very exciting trust me.

Well MSMers picked up on it shortly after and the results were hilarious and frustrating at the same time. Let's take a look shall we....

The Associated Press- The AP decided to run with the story at around 3pm and various Sports sites used their content. NBC Sports, SI, and TSN all used a story that didn't give credit to any source. Not their fault, but how did the AP find it? Hmmm.

FOX Sports- FOX amazingly ran the same AP story but they took the screengrab from The Sporting Blog and used the tag "Special to FOXSports.com". I'm pretty sure they weren't given permission.

CBS-By far the worst of the batch. They didn't credit the source and even cut out the SportingNews.com watermark seen on the original photo. Just amazing.

So who got it right? Well you would never guess, but....

ESPN!- They originally credited PFT but changed the paragraph to read:

Several Internet sites have screen captures of the page that show Favre's picture with a caption saying, "Packers quarterback Brett Favre has announced that he will retire."

Is it really that hard to admit that a blog got to a story before a Mainstream Media source? I just don't get what the problem is.

Two points: a) I'm all for attributing information fairly and accurately but at the same time it isn't like the people who first noted this headline did any reporting, they just happened to read this headline on a website and then wrote about it on their website. b) Since when is The Sporting News not the mainstream media?

I guess some people beat me to it, but if the Packers webpage still had the headline the mainstream media didn't have to credit anybody.

It's like when one newspaper breaks the news of, say, an arrest. Another newspaper doesn't need to credit the newspaper that got it first because the arrest was public information.

Your posts about so-and-so not crediting blogs is getting really annoying. It's not part of any journalist's responsibility to credit anyone unless its information they couldn't find themselves. Like with your youtube video that ESPN linked to. Youtube is public, they found it, they don't need to credit how they found it if it's in the public domain.

Each individual MSM source doesn't want to admit it got scooped by ANYBODY. They want to pretend they get all the stories before anyone else. ESPN is the evil overlord of sports web sites, so they don't care.